Thursday, July 8, 2010

Symbian malware creates mighty zombie army:

Symbian malware creates mighty zombie army: Mobile malware that affects Symbian Series 60 handsets
is being used to create a botnet. Security firm NetQin claims as many as 100,000 smartphones have been
compromised with the malware, which typically poses as a game and affects Series 3 and % Symbian
devices. … "These botnets do one of two things; send messages to all the contacts of the address book
directly, or send messages to the random phone numbers by connecting to a server,” NetQin explains in a
blog posting. “The viruses will delete the sent messages from the user’s Outbox and SMS log. All messages
contain URLs linked to malicious sites that users won’t be able to see until after they’ve fallen into the virus
trap.” The Symbian Foundation said that the certificate used to sign has been revoked, so providing
revocation checking is enabled on a phone the malware will not run. Symbian downplayed the threat of the
malware which a spokesman described as posing only a "very minor threat"…. [Date: 8 July 2010; Source:
more..]